Review: Asus P4C800 Motherboard

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Let’s take a closer look at the P4C800.

The first thing we noticed was the stack of ATX I/O ports. Four USB 2.0 ports grace the back panel, plus one FireWire, Ethernet, audio, one serial, one parallel and the PS/2 input connectors. The RCA connector supports S/PDIF digital audio out.

As we look over the motherboard at a higher level, we note that a heatsink (but no fan) serves to cool the memory controller. Note that that the memory controller is rotated 45 degrees, as is becoming more common in many motherboards. This can serve to shorten the trace lengths on the motherboard, improving signaling reliability. Five PCI slots grace the board, plus an AGP Pro 8x slot.

Here’s s close-up of the area around the I/O controller hub. You can clearly note four Serial ATA ports. The ones labeled “SATA RAID” are controlled by the Promise PCD20378 chip. Note the extra parallel ATA connector, protruding horizontally out the rear of the motherboard. The Promise RAID controller also supports one pair of parallel ATA devices, either in RAID or non-RAID configurations.

Asus is using an AMI BIOS instead of the more common Award BIOS. However, the P4C800’s BIOS setup offers ample opportunity to tweak the memory and frontside bus settings. Be careful, though, if you plan on running DDR400 memory, as most DDR400 memory is already being pushed to the hilt. We tested with Kingston HyperX PC3500, which is rated to run at DDR433 speeds at low latencies. We were able to successfully run at CAS2-3-3 memory timings. Pushing the RAS-to-CAS and RAS precharge times harder resulted in some system instability, however, so don’t try to run at CAS2-2-2.

If you don’t consciously overclock the system, you can still, uh, overclock the system. The BIOS Asus shipped with this system runs the frontside bus slightly higher (202MHz instead of 200MHz), which results in an actual clock speed of 3.03GHz and an effective frontside bus speed of 808MHz. We’re not entirely comfortable with this, preferring to leave these decisions to the user. If you like, you can manually set the speeds to their correct, rated settings. However, we left the system in the default mode to see how both system stability and performance fared. As you might suspect, some benchmarks are slightly higher. The good news is that stability didn’t seem to be compromised at all.

Asus also offers a cool software bundle in Intervideo’s WinCinema software pack. It’s a fairly complete suite of media tools, including DVD playback, authoring and encoding. The only thing lacking is time-shifted playback. Also included is the PC-Cillin antivirus package, Asus monitoring software and the virtual Ethernet cable testing software.